It has a slender design, which fits into a standard ATX case. The connector layout is amazing, in my experience most Motherboards have the SATA headers placed in such a way that using the PCIe slot(s) with any modern graphics card covers most, or all, of your SATA2 headers, and sometimes even the SATA3 headers. There is more than enough room on the Motherboard for the infamously large Cooler Master Hyper 212+ (or EVO), and you will still be able to use RAM slot #0.

PCIe 3.0/Ivybridge capability will be really helpful in the future.

I did purchase the last one here on Amazon, and the restock looks like it will take 3-5 weeks, but if you can find this thing anywhere else, just go for it. Would definitely recommend to friends and family. Quality product for a very nice price.

Hadn’t considered this until having read techradar’s 25sept11’s review of 8 different z68 boards. This has worked well for me over a few weeks – no issues at all, with a intel i5-2500k.

Important features for me are 6 sata ports (2 sata3), hdmi+dvi+vga, lucid virtu if I go discrete, control for numerous fans, the graphical bios is cool, and other favorably reviewed items as seen in review above.

_However_, for my application specifically, and also pending the release of ivy bridge processors in less than 2 months, I think I would have preferred erring on the side of a cheaper solution for the meantime. Have been particularly interested in what the g530/h61 boards could do – these can be had for about $110 together (also going Asrock), whereas my combo was about $320. Sure, i5 is much faster, but for this application, the g530 would have sufficed. Perhaps new motherboards natively supporting Ivy will have some non-backward features as well.

I’ll keep this review updated if encountering anything negative with the experience. Am surprised to see so few reviews on what seems to be the value leader.

The ONLY negative point I have is that it would not run the 32GiB G. Skill memory set I bought to use in it. It recognizes all 32GiB. However, Memtest86 finds frequent errors, always in the same few bit locations. Switching the modules around produced the same result. I have no interest in overclocking or non-standard operation, and left everything at default.

The memory test can be successfully run with either set of two 8GiB modules, but not with both. Relaxing memory timing to below spec did not eliminate test failures. This seems to indicate that the problem is not defective memory. It could be that the memory is somehow incompatible in spite of compatible specs. Or it could indicate a slightly-defective board.

I don’t want to put more time into this, so have settled on a permanent configuration using only 16GiB of the 32GiB purchased. It is working well, and I like everything about the board otherwise.

I do think the memory problem justifies removing one star, and posting this review so others are aware of a possible problem.

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